Mother Jones Reports ICE Separated Children From Parents in the Interior and Referred Them to ORR as Unaccompanied; Interior Referrals and Stays Rose

Samantha Michaels and Isabela Dias of Mother Jones report that ICE is picking up children in the interior and sending them to the Office of Refugee Resettlement as “unaccompanied,” including children arrested alongside a parent. In the case that opens the piece, a boy the reporters call Andrés (a pseudonym, as is his father Luis) was arrested with his father, and “Andrés was never unaccompanied, but ICE confusingly labeled him that way.” DHS would not answer the reporters’ questions about how it makes such determinations; asked about claims of “kidnapping,” a spokesperson insisted: “ICE does not separate families.”

The reporting puts numbers on the shift, all from unnamed or named sources and not from published ORR tables. ORR received 3,500 referrals from July 2025 through May 2026. Interior referrals were about 20 percent of that total, against between 3 and 5 percent under the Obama administration and the first Trump administration, per Jonathan White, who ran the program in 2017. Attorneys believe interior referrals now make up about half of new cases. Between 500 and more than 700 children who had crossed alone and been released to sponsors were returned to ORR by ICE. The average stay has gone from about one month under Biden to roughly six months under Trump, per ORR’s own data as the reporters describe it.

On personnel, the article reports that Angie Salazar, ORR’s acting director, came to ORR from ICE, and that she has on occasion objected to classifying minors with a parent in the community as unaccompanied, according to a source familiar with internal deliberations. The article says the administration ended a long-standing contract with a nonprofit network that represented unaccompanied minors in court and handed the job to an organization founded by a former ICE agent. The article names neither organization. This timeline’s record of the ORR legal-services contract is 2026-08-06–orr-single-source-150m-burke-law-group-uac-legal-services; that entry describes the awardee’s founder as a former EPA and Interior Department official, not a former ICE agent, so whether the article refers to the same organization is not established.

Credit: Samantha Michaels and Isabela Dias, Mother Jones. Children and parents are named only by the article’s pseudonyms.